


These Arms Of Mine

by theinvisibledisaster



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: 12 Monkeys AU, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, Angst and Humor, Apocalypse, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Because this AU was fucking MEANT to happen, Bellamy as Cole, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Brotp, Clarke as Cassie, Conspiracy, Except When She Regrets Everything, F/M, Murphy as Ramse because this AU was MEANT TO HAPPEN, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Some violence and maybe a little murder, The Author Regrets Nothing, Time Travel, and who am I to refuse the writing gods?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-06-14 14:22:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15390657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinvisibledisaster/pseuds/theinvisibledisaster
Summary: "Okay, so a woman on a tape from twenty-one years ago told you who blew up the world and you want to go back in time and stop it? What the hell does this have to do with me? Find someone else to be your guinea pig."“It has to be you, Mr Blake.” Indra said sternly. She dragged him over to the table where the radio was sitting, the light still blinking in and out despite it being over two decades old. He sat down and stared at the ceiling, trying to pretend he wasn't interested.A woman’s voice spilled out of the speaker, “I don’t know why I still do this every day… My name is Doctor Clarke Griffin, and I…. We’re working on a way to survive… the bombs are coming… it starts with Alie… Pramheda… the true architects of the end of the world… they’re watching me… I’m running out of time… please, Bellamy.”Bellamy’s head shot up.“What did she just say?”Or, the 12 MONKEYS AU that has been torturing me for months!





	1. It's The End Of The World As We Know It

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the Otis Redding song because OF COURSE IT DOES, WHAT ELSE WAS I GOING TO CALL IT?!
> 
> This idea has been driving me crazy for literal months, but I finally think I've worked out a way to make it work. However, I a) know nothing about PhDs or being a doctor, b) know nothing about living in the apocalypse, and c) am writing this on my own with a crazy Word Of The Witness-style-Murder Board. 
> 
> So all mistakes are mine, and all plot holes are also mine, but all the rest of it is mine too, except the characters, obviously, and the plot is also kinda... y'know what, I'm just gonna let you read it. I worked really hard on it and I'm running on two hours of sleep here.

_Where are you right now? Somewhere warm? Safe? Next to someone you love? Now what if all that was gone? And the only thing you could do is survive? You would, right? You’d try. You’d do things. Horrible things. Until you lose that last thing you have left – yourself. But what if you could take it back? All of it? A reset switch? You’d hit it – right? You’d have to._  
**James Cole, 12 Monkeys**  
  
  


2041:

The world was still.

Completely, unnervingly still.

The only thing that moved was the wind.

The breeze rolled through the desert, and it sizzled, radioactive, as it dusted the sand into the air, spinning it in lazy circles and dragging it around the empty expanse. There were no trees anymore – there was nothing. What used to be New York, Washington, Los Angeles – bustling metropolises of noise and warmth and life – were now decayed relics of buildings and street corners.

Bellamy remembered a time when he loved history; loved reading about the old structures that had crumbled as time moved forward, but now he despised it. Because everything was gone, old ruins crushed under new ruins, and time never fucking _stopped_.

The nuclear apocalypse had happened suddenly, 21 years earlier, one bomb aimed by Americans, followed by hundreds of bombs aimed by everyone else, pointed everywhere, destroying every civilization; wave after wave of radioactive murder, killing everyone and everything.

Almost.

Small groups of people all over the world had managed to get to bomb shelters in time to survive the initial carnage. Then the other problems arose – the explosions stopped but the radiation remained, people started getting sick, and to top it off, there was no way of growing crops anymore. There were rumours of tiny pockets of land that the waves had missed, small areas where clean water could be found, where trees didn’t look like skeletons and green wasn’t just a colour in a memory.

Bellamy had never seen one.

 

 

They’d emerged after a few years. His mother had died in Praimfaya, but at eight years old, he’d managed to get his two-year-old sister to the bunker in time, hunkered down with a boy called John Murphy and his father. But Murphy’s father hadn’t quite closed the door in time; he’d caught some of the fire as he slammed the lock down, and he died after six months of feverish thrashing. Murphy had been devastated, and Bellamy had tried to console him, but he didn’t know how. His mother’s death had been instantaneous, and he hadn’t witnessed it – Murphy’s father died agonisingly slowly while his son watched, unable to help.

Four, or maybe five years after Praimfaya, they had finally worked up the courage to open the door, and what they found was disheartening. They were just kids – two boys of thirteen and a girl of seven – and they didn’t know how to cope with the utter nothing that lay before them.

So they did what kids do – they persevered.

They walked, aimlessly, but anything was better than remaining in the bunker. They were sick of staying still.

They covered miles and miles and they might have reached different cities, but it was impossible to tell, because everything was an expanse of skyscrapers that no longer brushed the clouds, now scraping the ground, and roads broken and twisted in the aftermath of having entire cities collapse onto them.

They found husks of supermarkets, pulled tins of beans and diced tomatoes from the wreckage and ate them cold because they’d seen enough fire to last a lifetime.

He only called John by his last name, and Murphy took to calling him ‘Blake’ more often than not, but Octavia was always just ‘O’. It felt like an easy way to separate them from their lives before – they weren’t Bellamy, John and Octavia anymore, and they never would be again.

Blake, Murphy and O were warriors, at least in the stories that Bellamy told as they marched.

They stole bikes from underneath a broken bridge and found flashlights in the remnants of a gas station. Murphy had discovered boxes of cigarettes, and kept them, but he didn’t pick up the lighter from the counter. He spent most days after that dangling smokes from his lips, never lighting them, just holding them between his teeth. When Bellamy asked, he said it was because his father used to smoke and having them made him feel like maybe the world wasn’t completely unfixable. Well, the words he’d used were _completely fucked_ , and he had said it with a wolfish grin, but that was just Murphy. Crass to hide his feelings.

Bellamy had nodded, but he didn’t agree. He knew the world was over.

 

 

Until one day, when he was sixteen, they stumbled into another group of people. Lincoln saw them first, eyes drifting up from where he’d been digging through the rubble and catching Bellamy’s. He had called out, while they stood, frozen to the spot, and then there were people surrounding them, welcoming them in.

For a while, they stopping trekking aimlessly across the empty stretch of what used to be civilization and stayed with them. Lincoln and Bellamy got close and were often sent out on day trips and scouting missions together. Octavia developed a crush on the older boy, and when she told him (because even at 10, she was nothing if not direct) he shrugged bashfully, smiled at her and told her that she should tell him again in ten years. He was sweet, and softly spoken, as was everyone else in the camp. They started to fit in, to feel more at home there.

It hadn’t lasted.

People were sick with radiation poisoning, and some of them were starving and dehydrated. They were dying while the world watched passively. The Earth didn’t care about them anymore, not when they had destroyed it.

Maybe it was dead.

Maybe when the humans threw their bombs over petty squabbles that the Earth knew nothing about, it gave up. It was so completely still and silent, and Bellamy decided that it used to feel more alive, like a heart used to beat beneath their feet and now there was only nothingness. Maybe the planet’s heart had stopped along with the seven billion people that died that day.

Maybe they’d killed _everything_ – not just humanity, but the planet that had spent millions of years raising generations to be better.

 

 

After three years, Lincoln had gotten sick, affected by the radiation, like everyone eventually was, and begged someone to shoot him so he didn’t suffer. So, Bellamy had hugged him and promised him that everything would be okay, and then he’d shot his friend in the head and walked away because he couldn’t watch as the man he knew became another corpse to litter the desert.

That was the first time he killed anyone, and it tore something inside him, ripped a small part of him so far away that he couldn’t even remember what it was. Something changed and he wasn’t a kid any longer. If he was honest with himself, he hadn’t been a kid since the day the bunker door closed, but that moment clinched it. He wasn’t a child anymore, he was a survivor.

After that, the killing became easier. When people got sick, they didn’t recover, not ever, so once they made their peace with it, they were put out of their misery before it truly began. Bellamy was picked to do it, time and time again, and he tried not to notice as it chipped away at his soul every time he pulled the trigger.

 

 

The one that broke him was Charlotte. She was only eleven, younger than his sister, and he’d never had to kill a child before; the children were more resilient, it took the radiation longer to affect them. But Charlotte got sick, and once she realised that she would die slowly, she had quietly pulled Bellamy away from camp and asked him to shoot her.

So he did.

He collapsed to the ground afterwards, body wracked with uncontrollable sobs as he dropped his gun and curled into a ball. Praimfaya had destroyed him. It had taken twelve years, but it had finally stripped everything he was and left him a broken man.

He was only twenty.

Twenty years old and he’d murdered friends, acquaintances, and now children, in the name of ending their suffering.

But what about _his_ suffering?

Because all the death was poisoning him from the inside. He knew it wasn’t his fault, that they were dead anyway, that he was doing them a favour by making it quick, but that never washed away the guilt. Nothing did.

Murphy had found him like that, hours later, still foetal in the dirt, and instead of trying to cheer him up with a sarcastic comment or a well-meaning speech, he lay down next to him and stayed with him until he found the strength to move again. That was why Murphy was more than just a friend – he was a brother. He knew that Blake just needed to wallow, and he let him.

The next day, Bellamy had pried himself from the floor and immediately thrown up onto what used to be a car. Murphy had patted his back and walked him back to camp. Octavia was there, waiting impatiently, worry etched into her features, and when she saw them, she sprinted into their arms, and all of them enveloped each other: the only family they had.

They left that afternoon. The three of them thanked the group for their help and their company over the years, but Bellamy couldn’t stay there, not anymore, and his siblings didn’t argue when he suggested they go. Octavia had kissed a boy of fifteen, Atom, before they went, and Bellamy found himself wondering when Octavia had grown old enough to have a boyfriend.

Then it was just three survivors walking, the way it used to be; traipsing across the land as they searched endlessly for something that didn’t exist anymore.

 

 

A few months later they encountered more scavengers, but these people weren’t welcoming like the friends they’d left behind. They were rabid, violent, and they attacked them without warning.

It had happened so quickly that Bellamy was on the ground before he could react, and Murphy was backed against a wall. Luckily, he was wiry, and managed to dodge the bigger man’s attack and bash his head against the bricks. Murphy had picked up something sharp from the ground and stabbed the man pinning Blake to the ground, and the two of them had shot the man holding Octavia, bullets hitting him within milliseconds of each other, two brothers willing to kill for their sister.

After that they were more cautious, but they still found trouble. More _scavs_ , as Murphy so eloquently called them, more ruins, less food. Nothing was easy, but they managed.

The third time they were attacked, a girl managed to break a glass bottle in his face, and he blearily wondered where she had found it as the glass cut into him, slicing a deep gash into his lip.

When the fight was over, Octavia had burst into tears at the sight of him, and he supposed that, sitting there with blood dripping down his chin and three bodies still half on top of him, he must have looked a dreadful sight.

The cut healed but the scar remained, and it just added to the ever-growing collection of wounds he nursed until they were burned into his skin, both inner and outer.

 

 

They found a woman one day, wandering along what used to be a highway, and Murphy told her to come with them. She refused and stomped away, but hours later, when they glanced back, she was there, following them.

It took her a while to warm up to them, but eventually she admitted that her name was Emori, and she was all alone. She had watched her family die of the sickness and then just started moving, like they had. She was kind, but rough around the edges, like them, and she taught Octavia how to con people, which Bellamy should have hated, but when it came in handy so that she could escape the clutches of some angry scavs, he found he couldn’t. Murphy spent the most time with Emori, however, scouting ahead with her and taking first watches together at night. They were close – trauma recognises trauma, after all – and it didn’t take long for the closeness to develop into something else.

She and Murphy started having sex a few weeks later, which Bellamy discovered by accidentally walking in on the act when he went looking for them in the carcass of an old office building.

A month after that, the brothers were sitting against a wall, watching their sister and Emori as they chased each other around the remnants of whatever city they were in. Blake asked him about Emori and Murphy told him that he was in love with her.

Two weeks later, he worked up the courage to tell her.

She had said it back, tears in her eyes as she did, and when they woke in the morning, Emori was gone.

 

 

It took Murphy a long time to get over her, and for a while, he became the sullen one, rather than Bellamy, a permanent scowl fixed to his features.

He remained that way until the day Octavia found Oreos. She had squealed with delight – she’d never had them before, but Murphy used to go on and on about how much he loved them, when they were in the bunker and all they had to talk about was what used to be. And the joy on her face as she presented them to him was too much for him to ignore; his face cracked into a grin, and Bellamy laughed at the two of them as they tore into the Oreos like they’d never tasted anything so good.

He had to admit, they were the best thing he’d eaten in years.

 

 

When he was twenty-three and Octavia was seventeen, she had started showing symptoms. He had ignored them, made excuses, pretended he didn’t notice, because she was his _sister_. She was his responsibility, but more than that, she was one of two people left in the whole world that he loved. And she was good. She was sweet and kind and brave in a way that Bellamy and Murphy couldn’t be anymore, and if she died, the world was losing one more good person.

However, wishing something didn’t make it true, and when the symptoms got worse, she had sat between her two brothers and coughed weakly into her hands, putting her weight on Bellamy because she couldn’t support herself anymore.

Then she did the worst thing that anyone had ever done to Bellamy: she asked him to kill her.

He refused, he was adamant, but she demanded it.

He told her that if he had to kill her, he knew she would never forgive him, and she said that it was the opposite. So he said that if she died, whether by illness or his hand, he’d never forgive himself, and she thought about it for a long moment before she snatched his gun from his bag and lifted it to her chin.

Bellamy didn’t have time to close his eyes before the gun went off and the image was seared into his brain, like every other torturous moment after Praimfaya, burned into his irises with the intensity of a thousand suns.

He wondered if he’d ever stop burning.

Octavia had told him she would forgive him if he killed her, and he had told her he wouldn’t forgive himself if she died, but there was a third option, and when she took it, he realised the most destructive thing – he was never going to forgive _her_.

 

 

Whenever he felt weak enough to follow in her footsteps and put a bullet in his own head, Murphy was right there beside him, cracking wise and always dangling a cigarette between his lips. Murphy had lost everything too, maybe even had it worse than Bellamy, and he was still going. So Blake did too.

They did what _survivors_ do – they persevered.

 

 

Bellamy wasn’t sure of exact dates anymore, but he was pretty sure they were both 24 when they stumbled into Azgeda.

That was what they called themselves, this particular group of scavs: _Azgeda_. And they were vicious like all the others, but they didn’t kill them on sight, and there was a level of organisation about them that Bellamy had never seen before, so they joined up. The leader, Roan, was self-important and a bit of a jackass, but he made decisions that all of them agreed with, and Blake and Murphy did too, for the most part.

After six months of proving their loyalty, they had the insignia burned into their forearms.

Bellamy met Echo while he was there, and he fell in love with her in the way people did in the apocalypse – violently and without any hope of a happy ending.

Eventually, Murphy became too engrossed in the brutality of Azgeda, delighting in the cruelty even as Bellamy shied away from it. Blake was tired of the bloodshed, but Murphy seemed to have woken up to it all of a sudden, and leapt into it like it was the only thing keeping him alive.

Maybe it was.

But once Murphy helped Roan and his small army gun down a group of non-violent scavs, Bellamy put his foot down. He begged Echo to come with them, but her loyalty was to Azgeda, and it always had been. She had known Roan since before the world fell apart, and she wouldn’t leave him now – he was family. Bellamy understood. What he didn’t understand was why she turned them in when they tried to escape, and why she stood and watched while Roan beat them senseless.

So they stayed. They stayed for years, and he finally forgave and loved Echo, and she loved him back, and Murphy became more sadistic, and Roan conquered more of the land until their small patch became a stronghold, and then almost a town.

Bellamy still wasn’t happy, despite his efforts, and Echo didn't understand why it was so hard for him. He had given up trying to explain, however, and by that point he was just waiting for the sickness to reach him so he no longer had to feel as though he were choosing between his humanity and his life. After a while Murphy came to him and told him that he couldn’t be the person that tortured people anymore. He didn’t have it in him.

Bellamy thought it might be difficult to leave, but he felt nothing but relief, even as the guilt of leaving Echo behind knawed at his stomach.

Eventually, they slipped away in the dead of night, and Blake had a feeling he was twenty-eight: 20 years since the apocalypse.

 

 

It was just the two of them again, wandering the world, always running from ghosts only to find more. They found more scavs, got into more fights over food, over shelter, and they killed people because it was easier than the alternative.

Then they’d stumbled on an old research facility, somehow – miraculously – intact.

They had ducked inside, looking for somewhere to sleep, and instead stumbled into an armed militia who had beaten them bloody. Murphy had been dragged into a corner and when Bellamy fought to get to him, one of the soldiers kicked him in the head and forced him to the ground where he began to lose consciousness.

Murphy had yelled out to him, but he couldn’t move.

Just as he was falling into the darkness in the edges of his vision, a woman’s voice had snapped through the air.

_“Enough!”_

 

 

He had woken up in a cell, alone.

It was dark, but as he blinked into the shadows, he realised there was a woman walking towards him and he snapped, "What do you want?"

“You have two options, Mr Blake,” the woman said and her voice was low and commanding, “You can either live out the rest of your life in this cell, or you can help me.”

“Why would I do that?” He groaned, trying to sit up and ending up leaning against the bars, forehead pressed against the cold metal.

“Do you believe in fate, Mr Blake?”

He scoffed, “Sure. Fate, Jesus, Zeus, the Easter Bunny – I’m very spiritual.”

“Call it what you will, but something led the two of us to this place, to this moment.”

“What’s that?” He asked sardonically. He was barely listening now, focussing on the throbbing pain at the base of his skull, and wondering where Murphy was being kept, or if he was even still alive.

“A mission. One I believe was destined to you.”

His gaze snapped back to her, curiosity getting the better of him, “Who are you?”

“Jones.”

 _“Jones?”_ Bellamy asked sceptically, eyes raking over the decidedly _un_ -Jones looking woman, dressed like a warrior but wearing a lab coat, and she crossed her arms in front of her chest.

“Indra. Indra Jones,” she said quietly, “and you are Bellamy Blake.”

“I’m aware of _that_ ,” he remarked, and it looked like she was fighting the urge to smack him through the bars.

“So, Mr Blake… what do you decide?”

 

 

It had been an easy choice, really. Sit in a cell forever or help the stoic, authoritative woman with her plan? He’ll take the option that involved the least amount of time where he was left to his own devices. Too much time spent in his own head was never a good idea.

And so he’d ended up following her down the long hallway and three flights of stairs, until they were well below ground, and into a huge open warehouse. There were people in lab-coats milling around, calling out numbers and strings of words he didn’t understand to each other, and there were soldiers along the walls, guns in hand. It was massive, the room, but the huge glowing thing in the center was the thing that drew his attention. There were two huge metal structures either side of a chair that said above a set of steps. A memory pricked at the back of Bellamy’s mind – going to the dentist with his mother when he was seven and crying his eyes out – and he decided that he didn’t like the chair.

Murphy was led in, looking surprisingly laid back for someone who had spent the last two days in a cage, and immediately sat down on one of the chairs next to rows of computers, observing the lights as they blinked. He reached a hand out to press one of the buttons and the nearest man angrily slapped his hand away.

“This is not a playground, Mr Murphy,” he snapped, “if you press the wrong button you could destroy the world.”

Murphy lolled his head back to stare at the ceiling and drawled, “I thought we already did that, twenty years ago.”

“Twenty-one,” Indra corrected.

Bellamy blinked.

_21 years._

The world was stagnant, but time just kept going.

It took him a moment to realise that Indra was still talking, “–would you say if I told you there was a way to fix it, to reverse Praimfaya, and set the world to rights again?”

“I’d say you’re crazy,” Murphy said lazily, kicking his feet up against the console in a way that made one of the men in lab-coats look like he was about to have a seizure.

“What do you mean?” Bellamy asked, ignoring his friend.

Indra levelled her gaze at him and said very slowly, “This is the Ark,” she gestured at the huge glowing structure in the center of the room.

“So?” Murphy asked lazily.

But Bellamy was fascinated now, at the way this structure seemed to bend the light around it, at the way the people working on it looked almost like monks worshipping their god. He was interested, and it had been a long time since he had found anything interesting.

Indra stood in front of it, her figure silhouetted by the blue light, and said the words that changed Bellamy’s life, “It’s a time machine.”

That had been the beginning…

…And the end…

Of everything.


	2. It Begins

_The beginning is the most important part of the work._  
**Plato**

June, 2016:

 

It had been a long goddamn year and it was barely past the halfway point. Clarke leaned back in her chair and rolled her shoulders, stretching the ache out of her neck. She had been on shift for almost forty-eight hours, snatching sleep where she could, but it had been busy and she was exhausted.

She wasn’t supposed to be this kind of doctor anymore. She was supposed to be getting her PhD in biology so that she could work towards medical research, to cure diseases and prolong life, but when Monty called, she answered. She always did. Monty had been her friend for years, and she knew he would do the same for her, if she asked. 

So she had gone back to work at the hospital and tried to do her thesis in the time she had left over. She was always tired, and sick of the people coming in with injuries from hate crimes. Ever since that awful man had started running for president, the number of minorities in the ER for head wounds and injuries consistent with beatings had gone up. It was a turbulent time, but she hoped it would get better after the election. It had to. Most days that was hard to believe, with all the destruction and the rhetoric being thrown around, but she still had hope.

Not on days like this, though. Days like this made her want to curl up and sleep for a week. Her shift was supposed to end the previous evening, but when a bus full of schoolchildren crashed on the interstate, she knew she had to stay. 

She lost some of the patients, and through her own grief and guilt, had to sit the parents of young children down and tell them that their son or daughter had died on her operating table. She did everything she could, but it never felt like enough, and when she saw the faces of those parents, it made her heart clench and her stomach ache. 

Clarke was leaning against the wall by the restroom, trying to drink enough coffee to keep her eyes open when Monty rounded the corner. 

“Clarke, oh god, you were supposed to go home yesterday, how long have you been here?” He asked, alarmed.

“Too long,” her voice was raspy and she took another long gulp of coffee. 

“Right, go home,” he said, grabbing her shoulders and turning her to face in the direction of the exit, “Get some rest, take tomorrow off.”

“No, Monty, I’m fine, I just–”

“Get the hell out of my ER, Clarke, before I make you,” he snapped, but there was concern behind his harsh tone, and his hands on her back were gentle as he pushed her down the corridor. 

“Fine! Look, I’m going,” she said, as she started moving of her own volition, but he stayed in step with her as she walked, following her all the way out to the door. Her phone started ringing just as they got there, and she smiled when she saw who was calling, “Finn! I’m so glad you called, I have tomorrow off and I was thinking–”

“Actually Princess, I was just calling to let you know that I’ll be busy with Abby and Marcus for the next two days. I probably won’t leave this office at all.”

Clarke groaned and leaned against Monty, who shot her a questioning look. 

“Finn’s ditching me to spend time with my mom,” she complained as she put her phone on speaker so that Monty could listen in. 

“No, I’m ditching you to spend time with Doctor Griffin and Senator Kane while they gear up for a big election in one of the most politically turbulent years in recent memory.”

“Clarke has just spent 48 hours on her feet saving lives, Finn, she deserves to have her feet rubbed and praise lavished on her all day tomorrow. I would do it myself, but I think Harper would kill me.”

“Oh hi, Monty,” Finn said sharply, realising that he was on speakerphone. He sighed, “Look, Princess, I promise I will make it up to you, with lots of chocolate and ice cream and I’ll even draw you a bath, but just not tomorrow, okay?”

Monty’s pager beeped, “Get home safe, Clarke, and if you feel tired while you’re driving, just pull over and sleep on the side of the road, because I don’t want to see you in my ER in anything other than scrubs.”

“Bye Monty,” Clarke said, and waved as he ducked back into the hospital. She started moving towards her car, frowning into the dark to try and spot it. “Look, Finn, I’m not mad, it just would have been nice to see you, is all.”

“I know, but you also know your mother, and once she starts something, she doesn’t stop until it’s perfect, and unfortunately, this event is one of those things.”

She yawned and pulled her keys from her bag as she walked, “You don’t think my mother is actively trying to cockblock us?”

“No, I don’t think Abby would intentionally do that...” But he didn’t sound certain.

“Well, either way, I expect a lot of grovelling on your part.” She joked.

Clarke unlocked her car and slid into the driver’s seat, starting the engine.

“I promise you Princess, I will make it up to you, in as many ways as possible,” he said suggestively. 

Clarke opened her mouth to reply, but just as she did, her eyes caught something move in the rear view, and she snapped them up to see it clearly. There was a man in her car, dark haired and dirty, with a sour look on his face, and her heart fell into her shoes. 

“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said, but his voice was deep and menacing and she felt every ounce of tiredness leave her body as panic took over. 

“Oh my god, Finn, call the police, there’s–”

He ripped the phone from her grasp and smacked a hand around her mouth, cutting her off. Finn's voice was still calling out to her through the speaker, and the man shut her phone off. She tried for the door but he gripped her tighter.

“Stop, stop it!” He growled, “Listen to me, you see this?” He pulled out a knife and held it next to her cheek, “I don’t want to use it, but I will if I have to. You understand?” 

Clarke nodded frantically, eyes darting everywhere, but she knew that her safest bet was to just do as he said until she had a window of escape. 

“Good. Now put the car in drive and get us out of here.”

Clarke stopped struggling and took a deep breath. Maybe if she could lull him into a false sense of security, she could make a break for it whenever they stopped. 

She pulled out of the parking space and turned onto the main road, “Do you want money? We can stop at an ATM, I can get you some–”

“I’m not here to steal from you.” 

She pressed her lips together and flicked her eyes from the street in front of her to the mirror, looking at him so that she could recount his features to a sketch artist later – if she made it out of this alive. He looked beaten down, almost sick, with a rough beard running along his jawline and a mess of scraggly curls dangling around his face. He seemed strung out, and she wondered if maybe he was ill, or on drugs. Her eyes flicked back to the road. 

He kept his hand with the knife in on the seat behind her left shoulder and leaned forward so that he could talk to her right ear. He was deliberately boxing her in. 

He scrunched his forehead up like he was in pain, and he was almost panting, “I’m running out of time… there’s too many damn people; it took me too long to find you.”

She swallowed. It wasn’t random – he had deliberately targeted her car, “You were looking for me? How the hell do you know who I am? How did you know I would be working tonight? What do you want with me?”

He seemed to notice her change in expression and he sighed and pushed the hair back from his face distractedly, “You’re Doctor Clarke Griffin, born in 1992 to Jake and Abigail Griffin. Your dad died a few years ago and your mother remarried Marcus Kane, a senator. You’re an only child, you followed your mother into medicine, then moved on to genetic research in 2018. I’m not gonna hurt you, Doctor Griffin.”

She frowned, confused, “Uh… 2018? It’s 2016.”

He didn’t seem to hear her, “Look, just answer all my questions, tell me what I need to know, you’ll be fine.”

He was starting to look a little more unhinged now, so she just nodded. 

“Good. Where is Alie Pramheda?”

Clarke wracked her brains, and when she came up empty, she almost didn’t want to say anything. What if she admitted she had no idea what he was talking about, and he snapped and killed her? She clenched her fists tighter on the steering wheel, “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. I… is she a patient? Have I treated her, is that why you’re here?”

“No, that’s impossible,” he hissed, almost talking to himself. He shook his head, “No, Alie Pramheda. Alie! Where is she?!”

Clarke tried very hard to keep her voice steady when she said, “I swear to you, I’ve never heard of anyone called Alie Pramheda.”

He punched the empty passenger seat in frustration and started yelling about something incoherently, but before he could say anything more, there were sirens in the distance and his head whipped around to look for them. He forced her to turn into an alley and park the car. He stepped out and she made a break for it, diving from the front seat and out towards the entrance to the alleyway, but he was bigger than her and he caught up quickly, grabbing her around the waist and yanking her back. 

_“Help!”_ She cried out, but his other hand clapped over her mouth again and she struggled to get out of his grip. He dragged her to a nearby door and kicked it, splintering the wood around the lock. He repeated the motion, and the doorhandle fell off, leaving a hole where the lock used to be. He nudged it open and half pulled, half carried Clarke inside. Once they were far enough into the building, he pushed her into a chair and zip-tied one of her hands to the leg of the table next to it. 

He was coughing a little, wheezing and acting manic, and she decided that he must be either high or delusional. She tried to remember what she’d been taught about handling aggressive patients, but the blood was roaring in her ears and he was pacing up and down aggressively, kicking empty paint cans. She tried to catch his eye, “What’s your name? You know mine, isn’t it only fair that I know yours?”

He paused a moment, surveying her. 

“It’s not like I can do anything with it from here, can I?”

“I don’t know, Princess, you look like you could do a lot from there,” he teased, and it would have made her laugh in any other circumstances, but not when she was tied to a chair by a crazy person. 

“Don’t call me that.”

“Blake.”

“What?”

He raised an eyebrow, “You wanted my name. Blake.”

“Alright, Blake, let’s talk about your plan here,” she said calmly. 

“Not my plan, Princess, and there’s nothing to talk about,” he said, and then suddenly doubled over with a hand on his stomach. Maybe it was drugs, not schizophrenia. He groaned, looking at her from under his curls, “You don’t know who Alie Pramheda is, which means you’re no use to me yet.”

“Yet?”

“They sent me back too early.”

Clarke felt like this conversation was going around in circles, but at least she was confirming her diagnosis of some kind of drug addiction, “Too early?”

“Too far back in the past.”

She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to remain composed and keep her voice level, but it was hard when he was talking like that. It made her wonder how quick he would be to use that knife. “This is the present.”

“No, this is the past, 2041 is the present.”

Her breath caught in her throat and her diagnosis wavered again. Not drugs – crazy. She closed her eyes in an effort to maintain her calm, “You think you’re from the future? Okay… Okay, Blake, why did they send you back?”

He sighed and leaned heavily against the table, clearly struggling to focus, “Ah… about four years from now, most of the human race is going to be destroyed in a nuclear war that decimates the entire planet and makes it almost unliveable. We call it Praimfaya. We used to think that the American government caused it, that the president ordered the nuclear strike, but we don’t anymore. We now know that it’s caused by a woman named Alie Pramheda. I’ve been sent back to stop her.”

“Blake, listen to me, I know you really believe these things, but it’s 2016, I’ve never even heard of this woman, and there’s no such thing as time travel. You’re just–”

“I’m not crazy, Doctor Griffin,” he said sternly, and his tone was clear: the first thing he’d said since he opened his mouth that didn’t sound clouded with pain or hostility. He knelt down in front of her and pushed his sleeve up his arm. Her eyes dropped to his wrist.

She tried to form a sentence but the words were just out of reach. She recognised that watch. She would recognise that watch anywhere, “That’s–”

“Your watch,” he finished for her, “From my time. It’s _your watch_ , Doctor Griffin. I’m not crazy.”

She shook her head, “No, that’s impossible, it can’t be.”

He plied it off his arm and placed it on the table beside her, “You’ll wanna keep your eyes on that.”

She nodded and stared at the face of the timepiece that looked so much like her own. It was a little more buffed, a little dull, but it was otherwise identical, and she found her resolve shaking. Then he held her own hand in his and started doing something on her wrist. She glanced down at him and he stopped. 

“Eyes up, Princess.”

She quickly looked back at the table, and that’s when everything went insane. 

The whole world seemed to tilt on its axis. The lights started flickering ominously, and the whole room started quaking. Something felt off about it, like all of a sudden she was in the space between being awake and dreaming, like walking through quicksand, and it made her feel queasy. Then the watch started glowing, a small strip of golden light leaking out of the center, and when the light faded, there was a scratch across the face of it. It had appeared of its own volition, and she tried to comprehend how it was possible. 

“I don’t–”

Blake held up her hand for her to see where he'd just scratched hers with his knife, an identical line, “Break the past, the future follows.”

“How is that possible?!”

“I told you, Doctor Griffin, time travel. That is your watch, from your future. It’s hard to wrap your mind around, but you’re smart – smarter than me, anyway – you’ll probably catch up quicker than I did,” he slipped the watch back onto his arm and checked it, “One minute. I have one minute left before…”

“Before what?”

He ignored her, too busy listening to the sirens as they got closer, and then red and blue lights were flashing through the window. 

“Goddammit, nothing’s ever easy,” he snarled, cutting her ties with his knife and dragging her to her feet, “Time to go.”

She tried to reason with him again, putting on her most polite consulting voice, “Blake, if you’re–”

“I’m not crazy!” he snapped, irritated, but it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. 

They ran down the corridor and out a different exit, but there were police cars at either end of the alley, and men standing in front of them, guns raised. When they saw him, they immediately opened fire. Blake tugged her behind a dumpster and crowded her against the wall, putting his arm up by her head. If she didn’t know any better she would think he was shielding her from the gunfire. 

“Blake, listen to me, you’re having a mental breakdown, this isn’t real–”

“You saw the watch.”

She clenched her fists at her sides, “I’m getting real tired of you interrupting me.”

“You won’t have to put up with it for much longer, Princess.”

“Stop calling me that.”

A small smile flashed briefly over his face, “ _Brave_ Princess.”

He kept a hand on her shoulder to make sure she stayed against the wall and then peered out from behind the dumpster, looking for a way out. The knife in his hand glinted in the light and the officers opened fire again, hitting him in the abdomen. He stumbled back and hit the door next to her, his hand slipping off her arm so that he could fumble with his jacket, lifting it aside to see where the bullet had hit. When he pulled it away, his fingers were covered in his own blood, and he threw his head back against the wall. Clarke moved closer, her doctor’s instincts kicking in, and reached out to him. 

“No,” he said, leaning away from her, “Stay back.”

“I want to help,” she said, and she was surprised to find that she meant it. 

He grunted in pain, “If you really want to help, you’ll come to Washington, two years from today, the Polis Hotel. May we meet again, Doctor Griffin.”

He moved as if to yell out in agony, and then he was gone. Vanished. Like he blinked out of existence. 

She clapped her hands over her mouth. 

That was impossible. 

Yet she couldn’t deny what she’d seen. 

Blake had known who she was, he was wearing her father’s watch, and then he had disappeared into thin air, right in front of her eyes. 

She had just been kidnapped by a time traveller. 

Clarke slid down against the wall, hyperventilating, and she wasn’t sure how long she sat there before the police approached her, calling out to each other as they flanked the alleyway to stop ‘the assailant’ from leaving. When they rounded the dumpster and found only one panicked woman, they immediately ramped up the search, kicking down the door and thundering through the building. They wouldn’t find him, but they didn’t know that, and she didn’t need to risk them accusing her of lying or insanity, so she wasn’t going to tell them.

Eventually, Finn arrived, her mother and Marcus in tow, and he helped her to her feet before scooping her into his arms, “Oh my god Princess, I was so worried about you. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” she breathed into his shoulder. 

Abby stepped forward to press a kiss against her temple, “Baby, we were so scared. Finn was in Marcus’s office, talking to you, and all of a sudden he dropped everything and ran over to us, freaking out saying you had been kidnapped.”

“I’m fine, he didn’t hurt me, I’m okay.”

“Did you see which way he went?” Marcus asked, “We won’t let him get away with this, Clarke, I promise you.”

She nodded along, but she knew they wouldn’t catch him, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted them to. She gave the police her statement and then she let Finn take her home and tuck her into bed. She was confused and anxious, and she felt like her world was falling apart, but she knew one thing for certain:

The next two years were going to be the longest of her life.  
  
  
  
  
  
June, 2018:  
  
  
Clarke wasn’t sure she could wait much longer. She had turned up at the Polis Hotel on the exact day he’d asked her to, and she’d been staying there for over a week. 

“Rough night?” The bartender asked, as she ordered and then quickly knocked back a whiskey.

She slammed the glass back down on the counter, “I was supposed to meet someone here. Last week.”

“Oh, he didn’t show?” The woman looked sympathetic.

“Not yet.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and it sounded like she meant it, “I’m sure he has a good reason.”

Clarke snorted, “Yeah. It wasn’t a date, it was just… I don’t know what it was supposed to be, honestly.”

“You’ve spent a week waiting around for this guy, and you don’t even know if it was supposed to be a date?”

Clarke bit her lip and shrugged, not willing to get into the entire saga with the woman, lest she think she was crazy – if Finn hadn’t believed her, no-one would. 

Luckily the woman didn’t press the issue, she just handed her another whiskey. They talked for a while, and Clarke switched to water, not actually wanting to be drunk, in case Blake showed up, or in case the gorgeous woman pouring her drinks wanted to kiss her. She knew that her remarks were getting more flirtatious, but the bartender wasn’t shying away from it, in fact she was making a few suggestive comments of her own. When she paid her tab, their hands touched as she handed over her card, and a frisson of electricity went through them. 

The bartender checked the time and drifted out the back. When she returned, a man followed and started serving the customers down the line, and she leaned over the counter, devoting all her attention to Clarke, “Look, I’m not supposed to do this, but I’m on my break, so technically I’m not doing it on company time. Do you want to get dinner with me?”

“That depends, is it a date?” Clarke raised her eyebrow enticingly, and the woman grinned. 

“It’s whatever you want it to be.”

Clarke opened her mouth to accept, when there was a scuffle down the hall, and her head whipped around. A man stumbled against the doorframe, holding himself up with his shoulder on the wood as both of his hands covered his front, red with blood. Her eyes widened. He was really here. 

_“Blake?”_ Her mouth dropped open and she moved towards him, sliding off the barstool. 

His head shot up, and he looked worse than the last time she’d seen him, his face having taken on sickly pallor, and the agony of the gunshot clear in his eyes. 

“Hey Princess,” he said, just before he slid down to the floor.

Clarke ran over to him and he lolled his head back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain. She lifted his jacket away slightly to reveal just how bad it was, “We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No hospitals,” he grunted. Sweat dripped off his hair and down his cheeks and she was struck by the urge to follow it with her fingers. 

“Blake, you’re bleeding out on the floor of the hotel bar, you need a hospital.”

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” He asked like a challenge, cracking one eye open, “I can’t go to a hospital, not in this time.”

She cursed when she realised he was right – they would pull up his medical history and discover a child, or they could find something odd about him and want to keep him for observation. She would have to operate on him by herself. Fuck. She nodded once, curtly, and lifted his arm over her shoulder. She helped him to his feet and he groaned, head lolling forward and ending up pressed against hers as she walked him slowly to the elevator. She gripped at the left side of his coat with her right hand, pulling it over him so that it covered his stomach. No-one needed to know that he was injured, they might call an ambulance and then they’d be screwed. He stumbled a little and she helped him lean against the metal wall of the elevator as she pressed the button for her floor. 

“Stay with me, Blake,” she said as his eyes clamped shut again. 

“Not going anywhere yet, Princess,” he mumbled.

She managed to walk him to her room, and he dropped more and more of his weight on her as they moved, which was definitely not a good sign. She laid him on her bed and practically sprinted to the bathroom to grab her medical supplies. She stopped at the min-bar on the way back to grab a bottle of vodka. It wasn’t a good idea, but it was the best she had at short notice. 

She ripped his shirt away and tipped the vodka onto a clean handtowel, “This is going to hurt.”

He didn’t say anything in response, but his jaw clenched and he let his hands drop to the sheets. When she pressed the cloth to his abdomen, every inch of him tensed, and it looked like he was biting back a scream, and then his eyes rolled back in his head. 

“Shit, Blake? Blake, can you hear me?” She called out, cleaning the wound as best she could so that she could operate, “Fuck. _Fuck_ , c’mon… Blake?”


	3. We're All Mad Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bellamy and Clarke work on a plan to take down ALIE, and they recruit some friends to do it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there will be sort of 'flashforwards' in some of the chapters, and I decided that to divide past and future stuff, there will be lines between them, but time jumps in the same period - like night to day etc. - will just be shown with spaces... does that makes sense?
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, I'm sorry it's so late <3

_If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things._  
**Rene Descartes**

2041:

_“Let me get this straight, you want me to go back in time and assassinate some woman, because you think that she caused the apocalypse?” Bellamy growled, staring at the huge conspiracy wall covered in newspaper clippings and red string. It was almost cliched, but then, he supposed, it might be comforting to lean into something familiar when the world around you is empty._

_Indra tilted her head in his direction, a clear indication of her displeasure at his tone, “We have evidence.”_

_“Evidence that this Alie woman fired the first shot? Evidence of exactly where she was when the bombings happened? Evidence like fingerprints, or photos?”_

_Indra gritted her teeth, “No.”_

_“I’m sorry, what do **you** define as evidence?” Murphy asked sarcastically, clapping Bellamy on the back as he appeared at his shoulder. _

_“Mr Murphy, you should not be here, this is a private–”_

_“You’re trying to send Blake through time to kill some chick so that he can wipe himself from existence. I don’t know about you, but I care about my brother. I’m staying.” He sat down and put his feet up on the desk, which made the lab tech next to Indra roll his eyes up to the heavens in frustration._

_Bellamy thought Indra might react, but the stoic woman just pointed to an old radio sitting in the middle of the table, “My evidence is that a woman sent out a distress signal when the bombs landed–”_

_“Ooh, **interesting** a distress signal while the planet is exploding?!” Murphy cried in mock surprise. _

_Indra just took a breath and continued, “She made a radio call, telling us that the bombings were caused by a woman, not the government. When we did some research, we discovered she was right – there was no paper trail, or any kind of evidence at all, that any countries government released the first missiles.”_

_Murphy groaned and threw his head back, “So we have a ‘Han shot first’ situation here?”_

_“Yes, except we don’t know who shot first. Only that it wasn’t who we’ve been blaming all these years.”_

_Bellamy started pacing, running the idea around his brain, "Okay, so a woman on a tape from twenty-one years ago told you who blew up the world and you want to go back in time and stop it? What the hell does this have to do with me? Find someone else to be your guinea pig."_

_“It has to be you, Mr Blake.” Indra said sternly. She dragged him over to the table where the radio was sitting, the light still blinking in and out despite it being over two decades old. He sat down and stared at the ceiling, trying to pretend he wasn't interested._

_A woman’s voice spilled out of the speaker, “I don’t know why I still do this every day… My name is Doctor Clarke Griffin, and I…. We’re working on a way to survive… the bombs are coming… it starts with Alie… Pramheda… the true architects of the end of the world… they’re watching me… I’m running out of time… please, Bellamy.”_

_Bellamy’s head shot up._

_“What did she just say?”_  
  
  
  


* * *

* * *

  
  
  
June, 2018:

Bellamy woke up slowly. His limbs felt heavy and his mouth was dry, and there was something aching below his ribs. 

“Blake?” A soft voice crept into his consciousness, “C’mon Blake, I didn’t wait two years just to have you die on me.”

He moaned in pain and heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Blake?! Can you hear me?”

He tried to focus long enough to formulate a sentence, but his lips weren’t cooperating, “Not dead, Princess.”

“Oh, thank god!” He felt something touch his cheek and he flinched before realising it was just Clarke’s hand, “I really thought I lost you for a minute there.”

He forced his eyelids up and squinted in the light streaming in through the curtain. Slowly, the room came into focus, and he could see Clarke’s big blue eyes hovering over him, taking up more space in the world than anything else. 

“Can you sit up?” She asked. He tried to tell himself that the only reason he was staring so intently at her lips was because he was struggling to understand, but really there was no excuse. He quickly busied himself following her instructions, and she handed him a glass of water, which he threw back immediately. 

“How long?” He rasped. 

“Three days, which is… honestly incredible.”

“Yeah, I heal fast. Whatever they did to me that helps me travel through time, it speeds up the healing process. Something cellular, Jones said.”

“It must be,” she was staring at him with fascination, her bottom lip pulled in by her teeth as she raked her eyes over him. He realised he was staring at her lips again and shook his head, thrown by his own behaviour; maybe it was just that he hadn’t seen a woman close to his age in a long time, or maybe it was because this particular woman was gorgeous. Either way, he needed to pull himself together and get on with the mission. 

“So… you seem to be taking this in stride,” he joked, raising an eyebrow at her as he swung his legs over the side of the bed and propped his head up on his hands. 

She grimaced, “I’ve had two years to come to terms with it, but really… I’m still surprised you exist. If I hadn’t spent all of yesterday soaking bloodstained sheets in the bathtub I would be convinced I’d gone crazy.”

“You and me both, Princess,” he mumbled. She blinked at him, eyes wide, and he realised that he was still using that nickname she didn’t like. He scrubbed his hands down his face just for an excuse to break eye contact, because he was having trouble focussing on anything but her, and he had a mission to get to; “Thank you for saving my life, Doctor Griffin, I appreciate it, but I don’t have a lot of time here.”

“I understand that, but before we do anything else, I really need you to take a shower.” She held out a towel. 

He took it without a single complaint, realising how awful he must smell, considering how long he’d been lying there, sweating and writhing, and how much longer it had been since he’d properly bathed. He ducked into the bathroom and turned the warm water on, letting it wash over him as he lathered himself in soap, careful not to bump the waterproof dressing Clarke had wrapped around his abdomen, which seem to consist largely of bandages underneath plastic wrap. It was rudimentary, but it did the job alarmingly well, and he was glad she had the forethought to do it before he woke up. 

When he emerged, the towel around his waist, she handed him back his pants, “I cleaned these but your shirt was unsalvageable so I bought one from a store down the road. It should fit.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said, smiling reassuringly, before he disappeared back behind the door to get dressed. As he did, he yelled through the gap, “Look, I really do appreciate you saving my life, but I need information, and soon. Please tell me you know who Alie Pramheda is?”

He strode back in, hair still dripping wet, and returned to his seat beside her, towelling at his head. 

A slow smile crept over Clarke’s face, “I can do you one better.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah,” she ducked over to the desk and pulled out a laptop before settling down on the edge of the bed next to him and pulling up some kind of video conference call. Bellamy shuffled to the side a little so that he wasn’t within range of the camera, and she shot him a grateful look as she waited for whoever she was calling to pick up. It rang a few times before the first person answered, a pale, thin man with goggles perched on his head and a goofy grin plastering his cheeks. 

“Clarke!” He said, his smile getting, if possible, wider, “I was beginning to get worried, we hadn’t heard from you in a while.”

She glanced at Bellamy, “Yeah well, I had to go off the grid for a little bit.”

The man on screen nodded enthusiastically, “Ah yes: the tall, dark and handsome time travelling robin hood.”

“That… that was so many words that I don’t endorse,” Clarke sighed. 

“Hey, you’re the one who–” A new person appeared on the other half of the screen, and Jasper cut himself off to beam excitedly. Although he was almost sarcastic when he said, “Monty! So glad you could join us!”

“Well I’m sorry my honeymoon interfered with your plans to hack the US government, Jasper, but weirdly, Harper didn’t feel like postponing it for anything less than a world-ending catastrophe, and according to Clarke and her gorgeous time agent friend, that’s not gonna happen for at least two years.”

A pink flush rose in Clarke’s cheeks as she avoided Bellamy’s eyes, “Hey guys, I’d appreciate it if we could keep the discussions on Blake’s hotness to a minimum while he’s in the room.”

Jasper cackled, “You can’t stop us Clarke! We saw that security footage, and your sketches, and–”

Monty cut him off, “Wait, did you say _in the room?”_

“I’m sorry, did he say _sketches_?” Bellamy asked, and she winced.

“I was an artist, for a while, and I didn’t want to forget what you looked like, and… why am I explaining this? Monty, please save me from this fresh hell,” Clarke groaned, while Jasper continued laughing mercilessly in the background. 

“So, Blake,” Monty addressed him, as Clarke turned the laptop slightly so that he was in frame, “Oh, wow, you really are…”

“I swear to god, Monty, I will fly to Hawaii and throttle you,” Clarke warned him. 

“I wasn’t going to say anything!” He protested, “Just that–”

“–that he’s a chiselled Greek god among men, sculpted from the songs of myth and legend personified, with a glorious mane of hair and eyes you could lose yourself in?” Jasper quipped. 

“Right, that’s it, Jasper I will call Maya right now and tell her how you feel about her.”

“No!” Jasper sobered immediately, “I’m sorry, I’ll play nice.”

Clarke sighed, the long-suffering sound of someone who had dealt with something like this multiple times before, and for a brief moment Bellamy recalled similar noises he’d made when Murphy and Octavia were being frustrating. It was an exasperation that came with loving people, and he could see it more clearly when her lips curved up slightly in the corners as Jasper sat up almost comically fast.

“Blake, this is Jasper, and aside from being my resident idiot friend, he’s actually an incredibly intelligent chemist and hacker, and this is Monty, who runs the hospital I used to work at, and also used to spend a lot of time on Jasper’s couch, hacking into things for fun. They offered to help. They were also the only people who believed me when I told them why I needed to know who Alie was.”

“It took us months of convincing, wearing her down – honestly I was beginning to think that she was secretly a Russian spy, but luckily it wasn’t anything as interesting as that.” Monty said dryly. 

Jasper snorted, “Yeah, only a time-travelling sex god warning us about the end of the world. Nothing interesting about that.”

Bellamy suppressed a smile, “So why are these two better than just telling me who Alie is?”

“I resent that,” Jasper said loudly, and Clarke shushed him.

“Because we’ve had two years to do some digging, Blake, and we’ve found a few things.” Clarke tilted her head at him conspiratorially, and he couldn’t stop himself from smiling back this time. 

“Alright, I’ll bite – what did you find?” 

“First of all, Alie Pramheda doesn’t exist,” Monty said, and before Bellamy could ask what the hell he was talking about, he pressed on, “Her name is Becca Pramheda, and she runs a bioengineering lab in Arkadia.”

An image popped up on the screen, of a beautiful, dark-haired woman, with sharp eyes and a list of accolades and achievements under her name. 

He inspected it, frowning, “So why–”

“Oh don’t worry, A.L.I.E still exists, but she’s not a person. She’s an AI.” 

“You’re kidding,” Bellamy said, looking between the three deadly serious faces surrounding him. He scrubbed his hands over his face, “You’re _not_ kidding. _Great_. So why am I hunting down an AI?”

 _“Oh my god!_ Time travelling hunk, evil corporation with a rogue AI – we’re in the Terminator movies!” Jasper suddenly realised, and he and Monty enthusiastically self-fived in unison. Clarke rolled her eyes good-naturedly and shrugged in Bellamy’s direction, but he found he didn’t mind the men’s enthusiasm – it reminded him of the days when Murphy and Octavia had the same ability to laugh at everything. It felt like such a long time since he’d seen such unreserved joy, and he just let it wash over him.

“I think I remember that one,” he said, vaguely recalling a poster with a hulking man wearing sunglasses and sporting a big gun. He was pretty sure the guy had an accent, but he’d only seen the movie once, when he was seven, and there were a lot of things from before the apocalypse that hadn’t stuck quite as well as he’d wished. 

“You _think_?” Jasper said, aghast. 

“The world ended when I was eight, Jasper, give me some credit for knowing about it at all,” Bellamy pointed out.

“Remind me to invite Blake to our next movie night – you’ll never guess what movie I’ve picked,” Jasper said to Clarke, who only laughed, hiding her smile behind her hand. 

“Anyway,” she said, shooting him as much of a stern look as she could muster, her cheeks still twitching with mirth, “So as best we could tell, Becca used to work at the hospital Monty runs, years ago, and that’s where she met a few people with similar goals, and she left, taking them with her. She founded the Citivas Lumine Corporation and started her research into the human capability for survival and sustainability. Somewhere along the line, that evolved into AI, although we haven’t worked out exactly why yet.”

“They’re on their way to being successful – our timeline has them at completing and releasing ALIE in the next two years, which matches up with _your_ timeline, Blake,” Monty added.

“Right,” he tried to wrap his mind around it, “So… how do we stop it?”

“Interesting that you should ask that,” Jasper said, a sly expression overtaking his face, “Because someone else already tried to.”

He glanced at Clarke, who was looking considerably less cheery than she had before, and when he returned his attention to the screen, Monty looked downcast and Jasper was no longer smiling, although he still looked triumphant at his information. 

“What?” Bellamy asked, “What am I missing here?”

Jasper rolled his eyes, “Lumine Corp was conducting human trials, something to do with whether altering our blood can make our bodies heal better, and… there was a volunteer on the study; she signed up because she has a bad leg from a car accident a few years ago. While she was there, she caught onto their experiments with the AI as well – the fact that they were sneaking it into the human trials somehow – and she _tried_ to put a stop to it. But…”

“But they found her. And whatever they did to her drove her crazy. She started hallucinating that she was floating in the middle of a dinner date, and her boyfriend had her committed,” Monty explained, “My hospital also runs the mental institution, so I have access to her records. She’s been one of the most uncooperative patients in the wards, and she refuses to get any kind of treatment. She just keeps to her room, writing nonsense on the walls.”

“So she’s useless?” Bellamy felt his stomach clench – he’d come all this way for nothing.

“Not quite,” Monty said, “Clarke, um… Clarke knows her.”

Clarke laughed: a dry, humourless thing that made Bellamy even more nervous. She pinched the bridge of her nose and scrunched her eyes shut.

“What are you talking about? Who is she?” He asked, waiting for her to explain, but when she didn’t, Monty jumped in.

“Raven Reyes. She was the girlfriend of the guy Clarke was dating.”

Bellamy’s mouth fell open slightly, “She... _what?”_

Clarke sighed, “Remember the guy I was on the phone to when you kidnapped me? Finn Collins? Yeah, turns out that he had also been dating Raven the whole time, and that not only was he lying to us both, but he was with her first, so I was the other woman. The only reason I even found out was because it was at her dinner date with him that she had her breakdown, and it was on the news, because Finn was a part of Senator Kane’s inner circle. It was quite the scandal for a while.”

“Shit,” he said, “I’m sorry, Clarke.”

She only shrugged and crossed her arms over herself, “It’s been a year, I’m good. I went to visit her when it first happened, to explain, and she… she said some horrible stuff, really nasty. I haven’t been back in a long time. But when we found out how she was connected to ALIE, I emailed her, asking if she would see me. And for some reason, she said yes. That was the only reply I got – just the word _yes_. So she’s either over the Finn debacle or she’s going to kill me. Which is why I organised it for this week – you’re coming with me.”

“Perfect,” Bellamy said, only a little sarcasm coating the words, “When do we leave?”

“It’s gonna take us all night to get back to Arkadia, so I was thinking sometime in the next hour. We can get food on the way, I'm sure you're starving,” Clarke met his eyes, and he immediately nodded and got to his feet. She held her arms out, “Whoa, first of all, I need to check your bullet wound, then we leave. We’ve got time.”

He let out a slow, measured breath, “Yeah. Time.”  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Bellamy couldn’t really remember what it felt like to be inside a hospital – he’d only been six when his sister was born – all he remembered were the sensations. He recalled how small he felt, how big every room seemed, contrasted by the tightness he felt in the corridors, and the overwhelming sterility of the white walls. He had hated it; it had made him claustrophobic, and until the moment he’d seen his baby sister’s face, he had just wanted to run away. Then he held Octavia in his arms and none of the fear seemed to matter, because there was a life in his hands and that was more important than any white paint or tight hallways.

But walking through the mental institution with Clarke brought all those negative emotions back with a vengeance, and he almost felt like the walls were closing in. 

She glanced over at him and he only clenched his jaw and kept his eyes forward. She slipped her hand around his elbow comfortingly, and he relaxed a little under her touch and let her guide him all the way to the end of the narrow corridor, where they came upon a door marked _‘Reyes’._

Clarke knocked. 

“Come on in, Griffin,” a bored sounding voice called out, and Clarke opened the door. 

The first thing he noticed were the walls. They were covered in what looked like a combination of complex mathematical theorems and equations, and scrawling handwriting. It was black chalk on white walls, and it was alarming. It stopped them in their tracks, and it took Bellamy a moment to refocus his attention to the woman they’d come to see. 

Raven was lying on her bed, facing the ceiling, and she didn’t even glance their way when they shut the door behind them, hovering together just out of her eyeline. 

“Hey Raven,” Clarke said quietly, almost self-consciously. 

“Hey Clarke,” she replied, “How’s Finn?”

“I told you last time I visited, Raven, I broke up with him.”

The dark-haired woman grinned, “I know, I’m just messing with you. I know why you’re here. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the stuff I said. Finn’s an asshole.”

 _“Yes he is,”_ Clarke muttered.

“So why have you decided to visit me, after all this time? Feeling nostalgic for the good old days? Wanted to get together a girl group where we write songs bashing our mutual ex-boyfriend?” Raven asked. 

“Actually, we had some questions about your participation in the trials at Lumine Corp.”

“We?” Raven sat up suddenly, interested in a way she hadn’t been before, and she took in the two of them sceptically, _“He’s_ pretty.”

Bellamy raised an eyebrow at her noncommittally and she eyed him back flirtatiously. 

“This is Blake. He–”

“You’re Blake?” Raven gasped. She leapt off the bed and strode over to them, ending up barely an inch from his face as she carefully inspected him, hands resting on his chest while she did. He wasn’t exactly uncomfortable with the close proximity, but it was a little sudden, and he realised he was holding his breath. 

“You know who I am?” He asked, confused. 

“Not me, exactly,” she tilted her head, dropping her gaze to his lips even as she tapped her temple, “But the _voices do.”_

“The… I… what?” He leaned back a little, trying to direct her attention back up to his eyes. 

“Whatever Lumine did to me, it makes me see things. At first I thought I was crazy, like everyone else, but after a while, I realised there was a pattern to my madness.” She skipped away from him and tapped the wall by her bed. There was something resembling a list in between all the scribbled numbers and dashes. Most of it was illegible, but she was pointing at one particular line:

  
  


**Blake and Griffin, 27618**

  
  


Clarke frowned, “27618, that’s–”

“Today’s date, yeah,” Raven said, grinning almost maniacally, “I’ve been trying to prove I wasn’t crazy for almost eighteen months, and _this_ is proof. I _knew_ you were going to be here, on this day, asking about Lumine, and ALIE, _and_ I knew you were going to bring Bellamy with you.”

 _“Bellamy_?” Clarke spun around to look at him in confusion, and he wrung his hands, staring over Clarke’s head at Raven, completely gobsmacked. 

“No-one’s called me that in a very long time,” he said. 

“No, I should think not,” Raven said, sounding almost bored again, “Not since O, right?”

“You know about–”

“I told you, Bellamy, I’m not crazy. _I just know things_. It’s all jumbled, but it comes out every now and then,” she leaned back and in a singsong voice, she said, “Murphy, O and Blake against the world, Praimfaya be damned. Echoes upon echoes of footsteps wandering the ruins. Ancient history and distant future – it’s all colliding in my head.”

“How is that possible?” Clarke asked, amazed.

“Whatever Lumine did to me, it altered something, chemically. Luckily, my brain is _all kinds of awesome_ , so it adapted. It’s taken me a year, but I finally have a handle on it. Or, well, _some_ of it.”

“So you know why we’re here?”

“Hell yeah,” Raven said, “And before I help you take down the Lumine Corporation, and Mount Weather, and ALIE, you’re gonna break me out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HOPE YOU LIKED IT BECAUSE I REALLY LIKE WRITING IT. 
> 
> WHAT DO YOU THINK OF MY VERSION OF JENNIFER?
> 
> WHAT ARE YOUR THEORIES SO FAR?
> 
> I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU, AND I LOVE ALL YOUR KUDOS AND COMMENTS, IT BRIGHTENS MY DAY, BECAUSE I'M STILL SURPRISED THAT ANYONE WANTS TO READ STUFF I'VE WRITTEN. YOU'RE ALL AMAZING, THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING IT.


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